Blog

Translator or DIY

Let’s say you are looking to expand your client base into an English-speaking market. You’ve got to make sure that your content and product information are available in a language that your prospective clients will understand. After all, they won’t buy from you as readily if they don’t know what you’re selling. At this point, you then have to decide whether to hire a professional translator to complete that work for you or whether you should try another route. Unsurprisingly, if you asked me, I’d say hire a professional translator. This is simply because as their title suggests, they are professionals. This means that they know what they’re doing. This is what they do for a living and they can dedicate the necessary time to crafting the best translations for your company.

It’s definitely tempting to just ask that member of staff who speaks English to start translating your content. In today’s “Ask the internet” culture, we’re all looking for DIY hacks to simplify our lives and save money where we can. However, can you really afford to DIY hack your company’s voice? In essence, your content is your voice and the way it’s constructed will tell your clients a lot about you as an organisation. While asking that employee to take on translation as an additional project might save money—provided that employee doesn’t ask for a raise—you may end up paying for that saving in the quality of your content. Translation requires a lot of time and research. It’s not as straightforward as grabbing a dictionary and translating each individual word into the target language. There are lots of other aspects which require careful reflection and consideration, or in other words, time. That employee will undoubtedly have lots of other responsibilities to take care of so they won’t be able to put in the necessary amount of time and effort consistently along with everything else they have to do. This can mean delays to your timeline, resulting in your products and services remaining unknown to potential clients for longer, and we all know that time is money. Also, if that employee is not a native English speaker, you run the risk of producing content which sounds distinctly unnatural to your prospective customers which may make them wary of your brand. If you go down this route and end up with substandard content, you may end up having to get it redone which will then cost you further in time and money. Of course this is true of any language pair and doesn’t just apply to translations into English. Whatever the language pair, it’s always important to choose a translator who is a native speaker of your target language to get the best quality translations.

Hiring a professional translator is like having a specialist on your team who works exclusively on your translation requirements, freeing up your other staff members to continue working in their own specialist areas and keep things running efficiently. Thus, you save time and money. In addition to this, you can work with them to build a relationship that allows them to consistently provide the quality of work that you need.

So in short, reasons for hiring a translator are:

To provide your content in a language that your potential clients understand

Translators are professionals who can dedicate the appropriate amount of time to your content

Time is money; you will save on both in the long run

Employees can focus on their jobs without extra stress and pressure

You’ll avoid confusing, unnatural content

You gain a specialist team member who works with you to create the content you want